Chapter XXVII
XXVII
The nuckelavee belongs to the Mirror class, which imitate human form without occupying a human vessel. Though they are weak in their equine neck, nuckelavees possess dual brain function, and removal of both heads is required to ensure the cessation of movement.
Xan knew he’d missed something when he saw the sun. An unnatural darkness blanketed the town, and he might have been frightened if he hadn’t seen the blackened sun before. He knew precisely how the spell worked. He’d studied its mechanics, knew the face of its maker.
Mann had been here.
The town lay scattered across a winter landscape, battered homes cast about like discarded dice.
The Order marched into town with an organized approach.
Theirs was not a traditional fighting style, because theirs was not a traditional opponent.
There would be no front lines, no bases of operation, little structure at all.
It would be chaos from the moment they entered the territory until they killed the final Orcan.
For now, the Sentinels would band together.
If they were lucky, they would march in formation until the leads got a sense of the threat, otherwise until the swarm pulled them apart.
If they were able, the Sentinels would split into their squads.
They would fan out from the center and roam the town until they cleared it or died trying.
Most of the damage was already done. The Order had mobilized quickly—less than two hours passed between the first detection of an Orcan mass and the Order’s arrival on the scene—but the Orcans had made quick work of the village. Most of the townsfolk were already dead.
The Sentinels struggled to see through the murk.
The horrific brilliance of Mann’s spell cut light out of the space between things by breaking apart light waves as they traveled.
It not only shut out the sunlight but diminished any human light source, making magical light the sole option.
The air around Xan hung thick with Mann’s magic, as if he’d left an unseen cloud behind him, which added to the complexity of the Sentinels’ task.
Casting magic through an existing field was tricky and took more effort than a spell otherwise would.
It was genius, really, if the goal was devastation.
Xan called to the others to stay together while he strayed off the road. He was among a select few fighters who had no squad. He and a few of the Elders fought alone so as to move more decisively through the thicket. Other people would just slow him down.
And Xan did not need light to see. Living in shadow occasionally had its advantages.
The town, what remained of it, was in chaos. Orcans had arrived en masse, hundreds of them. They swept over the land like locusts and attacked anything that moved. Like Xan, they found comfort in darkness.
Distant screams echoed through the artificial night, though most of the noise came from predators rather than prey.
Xan ran to the yard of a nearby house when he saw movement.
An Orcan with red skin crouched on the grass.
The creature huddled over its conquest as a starving man would his meal and chewed with blunt, almost human teeth on a long bone stripped of flesh.
A femur. The shape of the puddled mass lying prostrate across the Orcan’s legs suggested human.
The Orcan did not look up as Xan approached.
It had no eyes, only an unbroken expanse of crisp red skin pulled so tight white bone glowed through.
Creatures of bone and skin had no organs, nothing to pierce, nothing to slow them down. Sometimes these Orcans were reanimated corpses, bound in the filaments of the dead. But this one brought its Otherworldly body with it, crawling through the Veil in cheap imitation of human form.
Orcans could overwhelm a witch simply by virtue of their quarry’s ignorance. Get distracted, misidentify the Orcan, use the wrong tool or the wrong incantation, and you were dead. Approach a creature without having studied it, without prior knowledge of its weaknesses, and you were as good as dead.
One method usually worked, though.
Xan swung hard with the ax in his left hand and turned back to the road before the thing’s head hit the grass.
In the quiet of his quarters before he slept, Xan sometimes wondered what it was about him that found a sick sense of peace in what to others must be at best a horrifying necessity.
To face an Orcan must be the worst part of many people’s lives, and often it was the last, but to Xan it gave clarity.
Fighting was simple; fighting Orcans, extremely so.
Xan sank into the base of his mind, where panic and fear could not reach him.
A form of detachment, he knew, where training and muscle memory took over and the body brought the mind along as an afterthought.
Even the strongest witches were useless in battle if they couldn’t control their output.
Xan strived not to use magic if he could help it.
Especially for a fight like this one, the scale of which remained unknown, Xan preferred to play it safe.
He’d conjure his weapons and use his earthly gifts for the fighting as long as he could.
Healing Vic had drained him. Xan hadn’t lost that much power all at once since he was a fresh recruit.
There was good reason no one messed around with healing magic.
It was unthinkably stupid—all his better knowledge warned against it.
Xan knew it was a bad idea, knew it was faulty and foolish and reckless.
But he hadn’t been able to stop himself.
She’d looked up at him with her too-big eyes full of hurt, and he’d known he was responsible for it.
It was the only thing Xan could think to do to ease the awful tightness in his chest, and it hadn’t even worked.
He’d carried her to Max’s office feeling like shit every step of the way.
He would just have to be more careful today, more cautious than even he was used to. Xan was dangerously close to running on empty, and he couldn’t afford to drain himself again.
But where had all that come from? He needed to focus. Not think about Vic—focus. There were dead all around him, and Vic was safe, she’d promised to leave, and he needed to think.
Corpses hung out of vehicle windows, caught in a final attempt to flee. A smashed sedan lay crumpled around a streetlight, its windshield torn inward and bloodied at the edges. Human remains littered a nearby lawn, tinting the snow pink. Xan saw no sign of movement aside from the Orcans.
A few people might have found safety in basements, if any of them had had the foresight to get underground.
It must have happened quickly. The sun gone, and the Orcans descending a few minutes later.
Xan could not imagine there were many survivors.
It was a small town, and Xan had never seen this many Orcans unleashed on one place.
But the town was also decentralized. It would have taken the Orcans time to move through the network of homes on the outer boundaries of the area.
If people on the outskirts had weathered the initial attack, they could hunker down there and endure the rest. But there was little point in attempting rescues while the Orcans still swarmed.
Thankfully, the Sentinels, with their lights and their numbers, offered a more appetizing meal than humans huddled in their basements.
If these were summoned Orcans, only recently wrenched through the Veil, as Xan suspected, they would seek out the light source, determined to kill whatever hurt their eyes.
Light was new to them, after all, and they hated it. Few would have the sense to flee.
Xan hurried toward the outer range of the occupied area, where a row of houses sat well away from one another in front of a forest. He wanted to get behind the main swath of Orcans, and sent a signal to nearby squads to do the same.
If he and the others could get to the back of the mass, they could split the Orcans’ attention and trap most of the beasts between the two lines.
He jumped over a chain-link fence to cut across an unoccupied yard. The fence shuddered and creaked under his weight.
A shape in the darkness moved toward him at the sound.
A draugr. Far from Xan’s favorite creature to fight.
The thing reeked. He should have smelled it before it began to approach.
Before he even stepped across the street, to be honest. If Xan had been downwind of the creature, it never would have surprised him.
Upon being pulled through the Veil, draugrs reanimated decomposing human corpses.
As with many Orcans, no one knew what form draugrs took on the Other Side, if they had form at all, but this draugr’s earthly appearance was nasty even by Orcan standards.
In the absence of reflected light, its skin lacked the waxy sheen that typically gave the draugr a soapy, mottled complexion.
But Xan saw the beady eyes staring toward him from rotted sockets.
The draugr looked at him the way an animal looks at its meal, single-minded and mean.
The flesh around its mouth and ears had gone first and exposed teeth like rotten cherry pits.
Gums had shriveled and pulled back, which gave the otherwise normal human teeth the appearance of sharpness and length.
The corpse’s head had split like a melon above the right temple in an angry and fatal gash.
A car wreck, if Xan had to guess. They were common.
For whatever reason, draugrs preferred to occupy the corpses of those who had died violently.
Its arms swung dumbly at its sides, as if the creature had not yet learned to control them. The smell hit Xan with force, and he would have gagged if he hadn’t known to expect it.
Xan met the draugr when it lunged for him and levered the stake in his right hand up through the place where the corpse’s chin met its neck.
The flesh was soft there, and it provided excellent access to the brain.
Draugrs would reanimate until the brain stem was severed from the body, forcing whatever remained of the corpse to continue hunting.
Xan had once seen a draugr pull itself along with only half an arm attached by a shoulder to the bottom of a head, still searching for food.
Burning the remains served as a final prohibition on reanimation.
The thing fell with a great shudder as the sharpened wood skewered its brain, and Xan wasted no time in snapping a thin glass vial between his forefinger and thumb and muttering the spell as he sprinkled the contents on the corpse. It caught fire, and Xan kept moving.
Another fence hopped, and Xan drew close to the town square.
He had nearly completed a circuit of the crowd of Orcans.
Though plenty had been drawn by the Sentinels’ light, many likely remained scattered throughout the homes on the outskirts of town.
The Sentinels needed to draw the rest out.
The quicker they could extinguish the beasts, the greater the likelihood that some of the civilians would survive.
“Max!” Xan called, knowing the other man would hear him even at a distance.
When he narrowed his eyes toward the mass of Sentinels, he found the Elder at the front, fighting off two wraiths.
Max hadn’t changed from the suit and dark overcoat he usually wore when they left the castle, and he fought with a blunt cane of his own design rather than any of the Order’s weapons.
Max did not share Xan’s reservations about overusing magic during combat and relied on it entirely.
Xan wasn’t sure Max had ever found the bottom of his abilities.
“We need light,” Xan called. “We need to get the rest of them here.”
Max nodded, knowing in turn that Xan would see it from afar. A wraith swung toward Xan and he ducked, cursing the inevitable spellwork the beast would require. Wraiths lacked physical form and wreaked havoc through condensed magical manipulation. They were impossible to kill without magic.
As Xan phased one arm into shadow and reached for the thing, Max blasted a beam of light from the front of the Sentinel group, nearly blinding in the darkness.
It shot upward before expanding, dropping open like a flower and bathing everything in white.
Max kept the beacon lit for a few seconds, long enough for any nearby beasts to notice.
And they would; it must have spanned miles.
The Orcans would see it for what it was—a summons to swarm.
They would flock to the light and die like the insects they were.
Xan clenched his shadowed fist around the wraith’s neck hard enough to weaken its hold on its magic.
He could injure it this way, even enough that it lost hold of its spectral form, but there was only one way to kill a wraith, and it was costly.
Baelfyr. Xan had had the sigil inked into his skin years ago, as did many who wanted to summon it quickly.
To the outside observer, it was an easy process.
A minor prick with knife or fingernail, a dot of blood breaking the inked sigil’s line, and the fire appeared.
But the simplicity of the summons belied the grueling effort it required, and Xan gritted his teeth even as it created only a small flame.
He didn’t bother putting it out either, as the fire quickly overtook the wraith and spread to the grass nearby.
Light was light, and the Sentinels at least would be smart enough to stay away from it.
Sure enough, a handful of Orcans dove directly into the blaze, trying to fight the fire as they would its wielders. Their shrieks hit the night as they burned.
Only a few houses stood between Xan and the thick of the brawl, and he advanced quickly.
He didn’t understand why Mann would choose this place to make his move. It was too small, too unimportant. The Order would have no trouble explaining the destruction of this community. The public’s attention would hover over the ruins of this place for a time, but it would pass in a week or two.
As far as Xan could tell, there was nothing significant about this town.
He knew Mann had been planning an attack for months.
The Brotherhood had collected Orcans, drawing their power in preparation for a mass unleashing.
Xan would have expected Mann to choose somewhere strategic.
He’d mapped out defense plans for major cities, critical infrastructure, culturally significant landmarks.
Xan wondered why Mann would spend all that energy on a place so secluded. What was he missing?